En haut des marches (1983)
Directed by Paul Vecchiali

Film Review

France's decades long struggle to come to terms with the shame of the Occupation is powerfully expressed in this haunting, contemplative drama from Paul Vecchiali.  The film depicts a woman - played by the director's personal icon Danielle Darrieux - raking over her memories as she prepares to take revenge against those who denounced her husband as a Nazi collaborator.  In common with much of Vecchiali's output, En haut des marches is a boldly experiment piece that occasionally slips up on its self-conscious artistry but thanks to Darrieux's mesmeric presence (in her mid-sixties, the actress still has an arresting personality) the film has a warmth and solidity that makes it one of the director's more emotionally engaging and meaningful works.

In a similar vein to Alain Resnais's Muriel (1963), the film convinces us of the importance of memories and shows how these misshapen echoes of the past impinge on our perception and shape our present reality.  The difficulty that Darrieux's character, Françoise, has in accepting the past, her conflicted feelings of anger, guilt and sorrow, mirror precisely those of a nation yet to accept the shameful reality of its wartime years under the Nazi jackboot.  To blame others, to seek revenge - there are natural human responses, but when there is no clear culprit, when everyone and no one is at fault, such a response is futile and merely serves to prolong the agony.  Vecchiali is wise enough to know that a random act of vengeance is a pitifully inadequate way out, and so the film ends not with even more blood on the carpet but with an unburdening of the soul through grief and acceptance.

As is apparent in the film's verbose introduction, En haut des marches has a strong autobiographical element.  Toulon, the film's location, was the town in which Paul Vecchiali grew up, one that was largely devastated by aerial bombardment by the Allies in WWII, and the central character Françoise is modelled on the director's mother.  Vecchiali's family, like Françoise's husband, were suspected of being ardent supporters of the pro-Nazi president Maréchal Pétain, and this led them to leave the town under a cloud after the war.  Like the character she plays in the film, Danielle Darrieux was personally scarred by the experience of the Occupation, her reputation tainted by allegations of collaborationism after the war.  The actress was one of the most prominent to work for the German-run company Continental and made a tour of Germany during the war.  In fact, Darrieux was coerced into working for Continental after her playboy husband Porfirio Rubirosa was arrested by the Germans on a charge of espionage and only agreed to the German tour so that she could see her husband, a prisoner in the country.   Once released by the Germans, Rubirosa was branded a collaborator and became a target for the French Resistance.  For both its director and its lead actress, the making of En haut des marches must have been a deeply cathartic exercise, evidenced by the moments of honest reflection and poignancy that punctuate the film.

In the film, past and present, reality and imagination become merged into a confused dream experience which effectively conveys the protagonist's emotional state as she wanders ghost-like around the town which draws her to it like a loadstone, so intensely imbued is it with potent memories.  The imagined aftermath of the assassination that Françoise is about to commit is intercut with her strained meetings with old acquaintances, along with recollections of the dramatic events of the past.  Sadly, Vecchiali's attempts to differentiate past and present with use of coloured filters and what looks like a Vaseline-smeared lens are unnecessary, one of the more ill-judged of the director's artistic choices.  Certain scenes appear over-wordy and under-rehearsed (despite being convincingly played by some fine actors), and one sequence (the one with Darrieux's even better preserved contemporary Micheline Presle) is completely superfluous.  Despite such obvious flaws, En haut des marches holds the attention and moves the spectator in a way that surprisingly few of Vecchiali's other films do.  Its underlying message, namely that it is better to seek a personal reconciliation with the past rather than go chasing after easy scapegoats, is eloquently expressed and persuades us that this is the only way by which the ghosts of the past can truly be laid to rest.

Film Synopsis

On her return to Toulon in 1963 Françoise Canavaggia is confronted with the spectres of her past as she sets out to finally reconcile herself to a loss that has weighed on her heavily these past twenty years.  It was straight after the Liberation that her husband was taken from her, executed as a collaborator after being denounced by his own family.  In the decade preceding the war, Françoise and her husband led an idyllic life in Toulon.  They were so in love and the future seemed so bright...  But then came the war and the Occupation, and like most of the people they knew the Canavaggias lent their support to Maréchal Pétain.  Once the Germans had been repelled in 1944, the French turned on themselves, and Françoise's husband was one of many who fell foul of the épuration légale.

Françoise left Toulon under the darkest cloud after her husband's death and has never set foot in it since - until now.  As she wanders through the streets of the town, she is surprised by how vividly her memories return to her.  The past is so close she feels she can almost touch it!  Meeting up with her goddaughter Michèle, now a successful lawyer, gives the widow a chance to reflect on the implications of her pro-Pétain sympathies.  By going along with the Occupation, were she and her husband not lending their support to the Holocaust?   Françoise's original motive for returning to Toulon was to take revenge against the family who betrayed her husband.  But as she looks back into the mists of time she realises that things are less clear-cut than she had imagined...